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Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
Like with Antoine Volodine's other works, Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven takes place in a corrupted future where a small group of radical writers - those who practice post-exoticism' - have been jailed by those in power and are slowly dying off. But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, a couple of journalists will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement. This is without a doubt one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of words
100 pages, Paperback
First published March 5, 1998
About the author
Antoine Volodine
34 books142 followersAntoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French author. Some of his books have been published in sf collections, but his style, which he has called "post-exoticism", does not fit neatly into any common genre.
He publishes under several additional pseudonyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger.
He publishes under several additional pseudonyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
November 11, 2021
Reread 11.11.21 It is the 200th birthday of Dostoevsky. Somehow I fear despite his reactionary vantage he's a patron saint to the Post-Exotics, perhaps a reading of Notes From The underground by Ulrike Meinhof would have been in order. It is beyond incredible that I was completely indifferent to this book early in 2021 and yet after a evolutionary hot soup of serial rereads of Volodine, this has become a seminal manifesto in November.
This is why, seduced more by mutism or autistic rumination than by the romanesque, the narrator seeks to disappear. He hides himself, he appoints his function and his voice to strawmen, to heteronyms that will exist in his place. A straw writer signs the romances, a straw narrator orchestrates the fiction and is integrated as such.
There is likely a need to be cautious here. "Lowering the temperature" is the command from on high. While Antoine Volodine has thoroughly enchanted me over the last few months, I found myself strangely unmoved by this. It isn't the intrusion of theory into a narrative. The narrative lacked the lyrical bend I have constantly encountered in the author's other work. Then two-thirds of the way through Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, there was a pulse of framing brilliance. The attempts to capture the angle of approach of the genre were too easily shoved into an origin story. That seemed cheap. My interpretation may be the result of the novel's two journalists investigating the phenomenon. Perhaps I was just a hasty reader. It was certainly a day to foster such recklessness. I had hoped to pop in the door turn on the oven to warm up leftovers and finish the book. That didn't happen and by then hurdles may have led to a bit of a sprint. It is the year of the reread and there's my emancipatory hope.
We marveled at being able to take up the journey that other men and women had completed, out of friendship for us, in solitude and violence, whose vestiges we humbly wished to honor.
This is why, seduced more by mutism or autistic rumination than by the romanesque, the narrator seeks to disappear. He hides himself, he appoints his function and his voice to strawmen, to heteronyms that will exist in his place. A straw writer signs the romances, a straw narrator orchestrates the fiction and is integrated as such.
There is likely a need to be cautious here. "Lowering the temperature" is the command from on high. While Antoine Volodine has thoroughly enchanted me over the last few months, I found myself strangely unmoved by this. It isn't the intrusion of theory into a narrative. The narrative lacked the lyrical bend I have constantly encountered in the author's other work. Then two-thirds of the way through Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, there was a pulse of framing brilliance. The attempts to capture the angle of approach of the genre were too easily shoved into an origin story. That seemed cheap. My interpretation may be the result of the novel's two journalists investigating the phenomenon. Perhaps I was just a hasty reader. It was certainly a day to foster such recklessness. I had hoped to pop in the door turn on the oven to warm up leftovers and finish the book. That didn't happen and by then hurdles may have led to a bit of a sprint. It is the year of the reread and there's my emancipatory hope.
We marveled at being able to take up the journey that other men and women had completed, out of friendship for us, in solitude and violence, whose vestiges we humbly wished to honor.
March 11, 2015
This curious French writer, adopting multiple noms de plumes, has embarked upon an ambitious undertaking—the invention of a new school of writing known as “post-exoticism”, of which this is a mini-manifesto of sorts, containing its own set of opaque conceptual parameters, as outlined in ten parts alongside a strange dark narrative taking place within the compound where these writers are imprisoned. The school of “post-exoticism” is a fertile collective of writers united under the same rubric, parameters, oppressions, whose style, if this novella is an accurate representative, is a mix of Borges’s droll academia, Édouard Levé’s lists and fragments, Kafka’s paranoia, and a form of highfalutin humourless nonsense. Like the Dalkey release Writers, this short work packs in hundreds of weird ideas and scenarios, most of them unfathomable, and some inventive book titles that eclipse the work’s own, and falls into a rut of straight-faced opaque oddballery that can be tiresome to read.
November 12, 2018
Perhaps not since I first encountered Thomas Pynchon have I been this excited to read everything an author has produced. Although in this case, I suppose authors. If you’re not familiar with Volodine’s (/Bassmann’s/Draeger’s...) project, this is probably as good a point as any to enter, though you might also begin by reading his two-part essay for The New Inquiry on the post-exoticist novel and an interview he did with The Paris Review which both help situate:
https://thenewinquiry.com/post-exotic...
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
Volodine seems practically calculated to appeal to a reader like me: fantastical, cryptic, antagonistic to authority; worlds which broken, exploited, imprisoned people share with xenomythic beings; worlds where lines between light/dark, day/night, life/death blur alongside the author’s identities. Sounds pretentious until you get sucked in by his evocative language (great translation here as well) and find that Volodine don’t seek to abandon or eschew the novel as we know it, but to take it to new heights. Very excited to see more of this incredible writing appear in English.
https://thenewinquiry.com/post-exotic...
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
Volodine seems practically calculated to appeal to a reader like me: fantastical, cryptic, antagonistic to authority; worlds which broken, exploited, imprisoned people share with xenomythic beings; worlds where lines between light/dark, day/night, life/death blur alongside the author’s identities. Sounds pretentious until you get sucked in by his evocative language (great translation here as well) and find that Volodine don’t seek to abandon or eschew the novel as we know it, but to take it to new heights. Very excited to see more of this incredible writing appear in English.
July 20, 2015
DISCLAIMER: I am the publisher of the book and thus spent approximately two years reading and editing and working on it. So take my review with a grain of salt, or the understanding that I am deeply invested in this text and know it quite well. Also, I would really appreciate it if you would purchase this book, since it would benefit Open Letter directly.
March 15, 2016
'Post-exoticism' is a fictional movement of avant-garde* dissident writers and armed revolutionaries in a near-future dystopia, featured in several short books by Volodine. This is the first of his I've read. Here the story of prison interviews (mostly circa 2020) with some of the last surviving inmates from the movement, conducted by establishment-friendly journalists, is interpolated, sometimes mid-sentence, with excerpts from deceased colleagues' work, and commentaries on literary forms characteristic of post-exoticism (several of which, recursively, describe structures used in this book).
It harks back to the romanticised revolutionary intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century: Che Guevara, Soviet dissidents, kids in Godard films, all manner of movements of the 60s and 70s; whilst the idea of 'radical egalitarianism' as dangerous now seems potentially relevant at a time of growing economic inequality. This was first published in French in 1998, during that brief period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 when global ideological conflict was more or less quiescent. Despite the absence of anything resembling the internet, the text seems more of-the-moment, dare I say 'edgier', now than I think it would have when we were comfortably chuntering about how Blair and Clinton could be a bit better. However, as a product of the postcommunist era when Fukuyama's End of History was fashionable, it forsees a development of that: recent political discourse suggesting that many contemporary people find it difficult to conceptualise an alternative to neoliberal capitalism (e.g. in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?).
Though only about 100 pages, Lesson Eleven is hard to characterise or rate, tugging the reader about between heartfelt sorrow and a satire of literary theory during which it's unclear exactly to what extent the narrative is joking. I doubt I'd greatly enjoy (or, for that matter, start) a significantly longer book like this, but at this brevity, it was interesting to have a reminder of some of the highly complex stuff out there.
I have a fondness for stories of the doomed with a Romantic /decadent/aesthetic slant; these characters are similarly doomed but there is little grandeur or beauty about it. This rawness perhaps demands a greater level of resilience to read; it is wretched and very sad as the noose tightens around the writers as a group, as colleagues are picked off and the remaining people are left more and more alone, their views and works becoming increasingly incomprehensible and unimportant in society.
I think I prefer more quotidian detail in a story of this sort, with more character delineation so they are personalities not ciphers, but I forgot that most of the time, as there is nonetheless an aching, universal sorrow to what is here.
Lesson Eleven light years away from the popular idea of "inspirational literature" yet I could not but see it as being about intrinsic motivation: doing something for oneself and those around you whom it affects, rather than For The Ages (or fame or Instagram or whatever). The Post-Exoticists cannot overturn the regime that imprisons them, although they had tried in isolated ways; their art is become more for the comfort of one another, and it exists because they are people who cannot help but produce it.
A phenomenon was produced that we named intersailing or vault swelling and the music allowed access to the same dreamlike universes that reciting poems did. We marveled at being able to take up the journey that other men and women had completed, out of friendship for us, in solitude and violence, whose vestiges we humbly wished to honor. Clementi’s music resuscitated these vestiges and gave us the power to recite them.
Unlike the unfeasibly indomitable examples in self-help, yes they do waver and become disheartened at times, and eventually solace is drawn simply from looking at pictures rather than producing anything new. The governing regime may in time fall like Ozymandias, but they see themselves and all their friends crumbling to dust in front of their own eyes long before that will ever happen. (Perhaps, to those familiar with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Volodine's mentions of it will be significant here.)
He had reached the moment of our common adventure that several of us had described, in books completed or otherwise, as that of ultimate defeat. When the last surviving member on the list of the dead — and, this time, it was Bassmann — stammered his final syllable, then, on this side of the story as well as beyond it, only the enemy would keep strutting straight ahead, undefeated, invincible, and, among the victims of the enemy, no spokesperson would now dare come to interpret or reinterpret any of our voices, or to love us.
However, if no-one much cares, one is gloriously free from the demands and restrictions of audience: This feeling of infinite intellectual freedom perhaps came as well from the fact that the outside world was no longer interested in the prisoners of the high-security sector, or their literature. Outside, the secular world had sunk into atrocious conflicts, removed more and more from the “egalitarianism or barbarism” binary that had inspired, that had illuminated our crimes during the seventies and eighties. Barbarism having triumphed on every level, the idea of fighting to get rid of it had become so foreign to official ideologues, so abstruse, that the convictions we still held onto in the prison universe no longer meant anything to them.
The narrator during the interview scenes / frame is presented as a collective 'we', the voice of the deceased writers whose "spongy", decaying pictures have been stuck to their comrades' cell walls as a comfort - this is a poignant idea I really liked. As to the names of the 60+ writers of the post-exoticist movement, the VIDA counters would be delighted, as there are slightly more women than men, but near enough half and half; I thought the voice could have been made to sound either neutral in its sexuality or be arguing with itself about it. As it is, it's attracted to women - and to the female journalist conducting the interview - in an uncomplicated, uncommented way. There are other times when the voice sounds more likely to be male than female - but not definitively so, as I could think of things said by women I've met, or things I've said myself, that resembled the phrases in question. They are subtle enough that it could simply be a translation issue: e.g. describing someone on your own side in a slightly denigrating way that seems to imply you have never been like that yourself, and have no fear or expectation of ever doing so. But then this book was written when these matters of gender and sexuality were not scrutinised so closely.
The tenacity and eventual attrition of the post-exoticists I prefer to see as an illustration of the human condition (or of the conditions for some humans), but their continuation in the face of not just indifference but ultimately opposition could seem, to those involved in the production of obscure art, to be a magnification of the conditions of poorly-paying avant-garde creative work. (I thought of Orfeo.) Including how immersion in that work may contribute to a sense of separateness: We felt alien to the human populations we mixed with on our journeys, in our books, when we traveled in dreams, when we began visiting the outside to witness the triumph of the capitalist order and its wars...
Facing the essentially bipedal and essentially murderous population completely enchanted by capitalist bestiality, we too felt like bipeds and murderers, but also foreigners, in service to a parallel civilization, bearing another intelligence and another blood
I understand from hints in this book, and reviews I've read of other Volodines, that the Post-Exoticists were involved in guerilla actions, although Ten Lessons is nearly all about writing and imprisonment. The commentaries on their work in here suggest that it was rarely overtly political, more often cryptic, or taking refuge in structural and language games or hermetic dreams. There isn't systematic world-building here that mentions whether or not they were trying to live with restrictions on what they could produce, especially whilst imprisoned, but I thought of this retreat as finding freedom to play in areas where it still existed, or even a parallel to the contemporary turn towards introspective (which I'm as guilty of as any regular posters on here) and fantasy writing, because it feels safer and easier at a time like this - because there really only is so much one can take - to wallow in what one might be able to change (oneself), or in flights of the imagination.
* For lack of finding a convincing place for post-exoticism, it is relegated to the avant-gardes, to whom, it must be said, it shares the same relation with as it does with the rest of the non-incarcerated world. Post-exoticism is a literature coming from elsewhere and going elsewhere, an alien literature that welcomes various leanings and tendencies, many of which reject sterile avant-gardism.
It harks back to the romanticised revolutionary intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century: Che Guevara, Soviet dissidents, kids in Godard films, all manner of movements of the 60s and 70s; whilst the idea of 'radical egalitarianism' as dangerous now seems potentially relevant at a time of growing economic inequality. This was first published in French in 1998, during that brief period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 when global ideological conflict was more or less quiescent. Despite the absence of anything resembling the internet, the text seems more of-the-moment, dare I say 'edgier', now than I think it would have when we were comfortably chuntering about how Blair and Clinton could be a bit better. However, as a product of the postcommunist era when Fukuyama's End of History was fashionable, it forsees a development of that: recent political discourse suggesting that many contemporary people find it difficult to conceptualise an alternative to neoliberal capitalism (e.g. in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?).
Though only about 100 pages, Lesson Eleven is hard to characterise or rate, tugging the reader about between heartfelt sorrow and a satire of literary theory during which it's unclear exactly to what extent the narrative is joking. I doubt I'd greatly enjoy (or, for that matter, start) a significantly longer book like this, but at this brevity, it was interesting to have a reminder of some of the highly complex stuff out there.
I have a fondness for stories of the doomed with a Romantic /decadent/aesthetic slant; these characters are similarly doomed but there is little grandeur or beauty about it. This rawness perhaps demands a greater level of resilience to read; it is wretched and very sad as the noose tightens around the writers as a group, as colleagues are picked off and the remaining people are left more and more alone, their views and works becoming increasingly incomprehensible and unimportant in society.
I think I prefer more quotidian detail in a story of this sort, with more character delineation so they are personalities not ciphers, but I forgot that most of the time, as there is nonetheless an aching, universal sorrow to what is here.
Lesson Eleven light years away from the popular idea of "inspirational literature" yet I could not but see it as being about intrinsic motivation: doing something for oneself and those around you whom it affects, rather than For The Ages (or fame or Instagram or whatever). The Post-Exoticists cannot overturn the regime that imprisons them, although they had tried in isolated ways; their art is become more for the comfort of one another, and it exists because they are people who cannot help but produce it.
A phenomenon was produced that we named intersailing or vault swelling and the music allowed access to the same dreamlike universes that reciting poems did. We marveled at being able to take up the journey that other men and women had completed, out of friendship for us, in solitude and violence, whose vestiges we humbly wished to honor. Clementi’s music resuscitated these vestiges and gave us the power to recite them.
Unlike the unfeasibly indomitable examples in self-help, yes they do waver and become disheartened at times, and eventually solace is drawn simply from looking at pictures rather than producing anything new. The governing regime may in time fall like Ozymandias, but they see themselves and all their friends crumbling to dust in front of their own eyes long before that will ever happen. (Perhaps, to those familiar with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Volodine's mentions of it will be significant here.)
He had reached the moment of our common adventure that several of us had described, in books completed or otherwise, as that of ultimate defeat. When the last surviving member on the list of the dead — and, this time, it was Bassmann — stammered his final syllable, then, on this side of the story as well as beyond it, only the enemy would keep strutting straight ahead, undefeated, invincible, and, among the victims of the enemy, no spokesperson would now dare come to interpret or reinterpret any of our voices, or to love us.
However, if no-one much cares, one is gloriously free from the demands and restrictions of audience: This feeling of infinite intellectual freedom perhaps came as well from the fact that the outside world was no longer interested in the prisoners of the high-security sector, or their literature. Outside, the secular world had sunk into atrocious conflicts, removed more and more from the “egalitarianism or barbarism” binary that had inspired, that had illuminated our crimes during the seventies and eighties. Barbarism having triumphed on every level, the idea of fighting to get rid of it had become so foreign to official ideologues, so abstruse, that the convictions we still held onto in the prison universe no longer meant anything to them.
The narrator during the interview scenes / frame is presented as a collective 'we', the voice of the deceased writers whose "spongy", decaying pictures have been stuck to their comrades' cell walls as a comfort - this is a poignant idea I really liked. As to the names of the 60+ writers of the post-exoticist movement, the VIDA counters would be delighted, as there are slightly more women than men, but near enough half and half; I thought the voice could have been made to sound either neutral in its sexuality or be arguing with itself about it. As it is, it's attracted to women - and to the female journalist conducting the interview - in an uncomplicated, uncommented way. There are other times when the voice sounds more likely to be male than female - but not definitively so, as I could think of things said by women I've met, or things I've said myself, that resembled the phrases in question. They are subtle enough that it could simply be a translation issue: e.g. describing someone on your own side in a slightly denigrating way that seems to imply you have never been like that yourself, and have no fear or expectation of ever doing so. But then this book was written when these matters of gender and sexuality were not scrutinised so closely.
The tenacity and eventual attrition of the post-exoticists I prefer to see as an illustration of the human condition (or of the conditions for some humans), but their continuation in the face of not just indifference but ultimately opposition could seem, to those involved in the production of obscure art, to be a magnification of the conditions of poorly-paying avant-garde creative work. (I thought of Orfeo.) Including how immersion in that work may contribute to a sense of separateness: We felt alien to the human populations we mixed with on our journeys, in our books, when we traveled in dreams, when we began visiting the outside to witness the triumph of the capitalist order and its wars...
Facing the essentially bipedal and essentially murderous population completely enchanted by capitalist bestiality, we too felt like bipeds and murderers, but also foreigners, in service to a parallel civilization, bearing another intelligence and another blood
I understand from hints in this book, and reviews I've read of other Volodines, that the Post-Exoticists were involved in guerilla actions, although Ten Lessons is nearly all about writing and imprisonment. The commentaries on their work in here suggest that it was rarely overtly political, more often cryptic, or taking refuge in structural and language games or hermetic dreams. There isn't systematic world-building here that mentions whether or not they were trying to live with restrictions on what they could produce, especially whilst imprisoned, but I thought of this retreat as finding freedom to play in areas where it still existed, or even a parallel to the contemporary turn towards introspective (which I'm as guilty of as any regular posters on here) and fantasy writing, because it feels safer and easier at a time like this - because there really only is so much one can take - to wallow in what one might be able to change (oneself), or in flights of the imagination.
* For lack of finding a convincing place for post-exoticism, it is relegated to the avant-gardes, to whom, it must be said, it shares the same relation with as it does with the rest of the non-incarcerated world. Post-exoticism is a literature coming from elsewhere and going elsewhere, an alien literature that welcomes various leanings and tendencies, many of which reject sterile avant-gardism.
January 23, 2017
Is this the rosetta to Volodine's post-apocalyptic literary universe of incarcerated heretics devising new forms and structures with which to express their utter separation and disgust for the debased outside world? Possibly? So far, having read only this and Writers, I've probably only encountered Volodine's more aggressively meta-textual works of 'post-exoticism', so I look forward to descending into the works themselves, if such exist. Probably, the entire decade-spanning project will prove to be greater sense and cohesion when considered all together, I get the feeling.
Read
August 17, 2015"The media had relegated egalitarianism to the rank of causes not only lost, but obsolete and forgotten."
October 19, 2018
Need more ASAP.
February 9, 2017
"When all we were had been removed, even the masks, we listened to Clementi's songs. We had ended up in garbage dumps or in prison, we were buried in obliviating ashes, and we listed the dead: Maria Schrag, Siegfried Schulz, Inge Albrecht, the Katalina Raspe commune, the Verena Goergens commando unit, Infernus Iohannes, Breughel, the Ingrid Schmitz commune, and many others. The poets of subversion were nothing more than shadows. Outside, the masters sent their dogs to search through the ruins we inhabited, and they ordered their clowns to obnoxiously dirty the speeches we gave in the heart of the flames. These were the moments of distress when we most felt the need to hear an echo of what had been, in another time, our existences. We assembled ourselves with difficulty, groping about, we crossed again together the darkness's first dark ordeals, at our memory's peril we roamed dusty streets, ruins, long swamps of soot and, finally, we found the path to the room, and we pushed open the door. A handful of waggish survivors had filled their empty eye sockets, below their eyelids or above, with grayish pebbles, smoothed stones, with the idea of dramatizing from this a hopeless simulacrum of courage. With deep affection we took each other by the hand in the darkness, then formed a pile in the depths of the cave, in affectionate harmony. From time to time, in order to notify others of their position, those with stones took them from their quarters and knocked them together, saying: Siegfried Schulz calls Clementi, please respond, or: Katalina Raspe calls Clementi, please respond. Sometimes the door to the room would open abruptly, the hinges creaked, the panel banged against the wall. We stopped speaking. A flashlight was shone here and there in the thick emptiness, searching for stowaways or forbidden writings. As nothing differentiated us from the debris, the investigators did not detect our presence, and the door was closed once again. After an hour or two of vigilance, one of us would start again, saying: Breughel calls Clementi, please respond. Then, in the heart of the darkness, the music was born, very intense, overcoming organic boundaries and penetrating each person sometimes from the room's interior, sometimes from the refuge of our skulls. We murmured a few terrible phrases, formerly made by autumn monks and dissidents, we whispered chants of dread for the Ingrid Schmitz commune, then we curled up in increased solidarity. Clementi's music offered its architecture to our forms, Clementi's music recomposed what had been destroyed and sullied in us, our broken and dirtied childhoods, the dreams that the masters' animals or official clowns had distorted or soiled. Throughout the rhythms, we began again to exist in our envelopings even more hermetically. We were holding onto each other by the meat of our fingers, by the flesh of our palms, and by the memory, suddenly inaccessible and immobile, dancing invulnerably, in scarves of fire, marbled black in the black transparencies of the fire, from image to image wandering and from one dream to the other, exiled, disguised as birds of stone and eagles of blood, always clothed in rags, sleeping breathlessly, mendicant, beyond any length of time, of adventures and combat, then once again subjected to temporal measurements, trembling with beauty, so touched we were. A phenomenon was produced that we named intersailing or vault swelling and the music allowed access to the same dreamlike universes that reciting poems did. We marveled at being able to take up the journey that other men and women had completed, out of friendship for us, in solitude and violence, whose vestiges we humbly wished to honor. Clementi's music resuscitated these vestiges and gave us the power to recite them. Sometimes I rose in the shadows of the room, bumping against those who had survived but didn't move, listening to what continued to rumble and endlessly persist, the pendulum of an ocean in the obstinacy of our heads, the respiration of a narrator in the silence of our bony oscillations. I rose, I knocked together pebbles chafed by tears, I went to open the door. It was dark. I wanted to pursue the struggle, now that the music had breathed enough energy into me to struggle and to pursue. I made sure no one was walking in the street, I sat down in front of the door, I stayed there for a long time, sitting or crouching. I started again my attack on the pebbles and I let my voice flow, saying: Breughel calls Clementi, please respond, or: Breughel here, it's very dark, please respond."
July 11, 2015
I'm not sure reviewing this book, or even trying to explain what it's about, would do it justice so I'm just listing some of my favorite quotes below.
"Their encryption is vain,t heir undeniable beauty is vain, maybe simply because no one--no one is listening." (17)
"This is why, seduced more by mutism or autistic rumination than by the romanesque, the narrator seeks to disappear. He hides himself, he appoints his function and his voice to strawmen, to heteronyms that will exist in his place. A straw writer signs the romances, a straw narrator orchestrates the fiction and is integrated as such." (34)
"It was going to be difficult to translate these demonstrations of bad humor, to adapt them to public taste; what was said here would not be appreciated on the outside." (39)
"Then, in the heart of the darkness, the music was born, very intense, overcoming organic boundaries and penetrating each person sometimes from the room's interior, sometimes from the refuge of our skulls." (58)
"Their encryption is vain,t heir undeniable beauty is vain, maybe simply because no one--no one is listening." (17)
"This is why, seduced more by mutism or autistic rumination than by the romanesque, the narrator seeks to disappear. He hides himself, he appoints his function and his voice to strawmen, to heteronyms that will exist in his place. A straw writer signs the romances, a straw narrator orchestrates the fiction and is integrated as such." (34)
"It was going to be difficult to translate these demonstrations of bad humor, to adapt them to public taste; what was said here would not be appreciated on the outside." (39)
"Then, in the heart of the darkness, the music was born, very intense, overcoming organic boundaries and penetrating each person sometimes from the room's interior, sometimes from the refuge of our skulls." (58)
February 13, 2016
How to describe this book? The 11th lesson of Post-Exoticism appears to be that Post-Exoticism cannot be understood by anyone outside of the prison system; not only can it not be understood, it does not want to be understood. For Post-Exotics prison is a lesser hell than the hell of living in a politically retrograde valueless capitalist society. They are, all of them, political dissidents who refuse to be assimilated, who refuse even to use the same linguistic conventions as deemed acceptable to the "free" world.
A heady and tough read. Volodine's perpetual task is to make clear the theoretical and literary style of Post-Exoticism, as if to make it intelligible, but then refuses that intelligibility is possible for anyone who is not part of the Resistance.
A heady and tough read. Volodine's perpetual task is to make clear the theoretical and literary style of Post-Exoticism, as if to make it intelligible, but then refuses that intelligibility is possible for anyone who is not part of the Resistance.
December 31, 2023
Questo libretta è una sorta di stele di Rosetta per decifrare o meglio tentare di decifrare, e soltanto molto parzialmente, l'universo post-apocalittico e post-tutto delineato da Antoine Volodine e il suo entourage di eteronimi. In questo saggio, non-saggio in cui la meta-narrazione diventa un mezzo aggressivo e sovversivo di costuzione e decostruzione viene delineata la genealogia di base degli scrittori post-esotici completa di sinossi di opere davvero scritte dall'autore o di opere per ora esistenti nella sola mente (o forse sarebbe più appropriato dire meta-mente) di uno degli eretici post-esotici condannati ad una lenta agonia in questo carcere fuori dal tempo. Ma non solo, vengono accennati gli elementi di rottura e più sovversivi della letteratura post-esotica, elementi che anche qua sono sia esistenti nel solo piano meta-narativo che rintracciabili nelle vere opere di Volodine. Gli scrittori post-esotici scrivono letteratura dell'Altrove, nata dal fallimento e dal passaggio da un secolo terrificante ad un secolo assurdo, i loro lavori sono strutture letterarie nuove, forse insensate, sono romånsi, shaggå, intrarcane, parole che si trovano anche nei romanzi e nelle opere più narrative di Volodine e dei suoi eteronimi, indicando così una continuità costruita con una sbalorditiva dovizia di particolare inserita in un tessuto che dona in cui il caos, l'insensatezza e la confusione diventano fin troppo coerenti, forse in modo inaccetabile.
September 30, 2017
This really struck me as an exercise in attempted inflation of the author's own school of thought, and thereby their own ego, creating an alternate present in which the purported philosophy is so dangerous that those involved in the creation of it are subject to endless imprisonment and eventual death. The whole thing just felt unnecessarily heavy, intentionally obtuse, and borderline pompous.
February 8, 2021
Bizarre. With snatches of lovely, evocative prose. It's my first "Volodine" book and I wouldn't recommend it as an entry point. I got lost in all the -isms and so forth. Really not sure what to make of it. It's short which works in its favour. Any future re-reads won't be too time consuming.
September 25, 2017
A playful literary science fiction that reminds me of Peeters' and Schuiten's Les Cités obscures in its gorgeously created apocalypse.
October 23, 2017
Stupendo! c'è tutto quello che si può desiderare da un libro di questo genere. veramente altrove; peccato non averlo letto qualche anno fa quando sarebbe stato utile anche per altre situazioni
November 14, 2017
I didn't understand any of it but assume it was really good.
February 21, 2019
I'm still kind of confused about Post-Exoticism. Volodine, please, you're (literally) my only hope.
December 1, 2020
A dense, highly complex, sometimes illuminating, sometimes maddening intro to Volodine's colossal literary project.
January 7, 2021
This is not, by any means, a plot driven book. And yet I found the ending left an off taste in my mouth, that colored the parts of the book I enjoyed. Volodine (et al)'s sentences and their translations are gorgeous, and I'm grateful for what is done with language. It was a pleasure to read, and I appreciated the exercises in form. I want to sympathize with Volodine's revolutionaries, but I wonder if I let it go over my head that post-Exoticism is itself already post-revolutionary, and we didn't win. I suppose I let myself be convinced, because I wanted to be, that this was a treatise on a speculative/fictional revolutionary literary movement. But man, so much characterstically French pessimism, with Eastern spirituality presented as the out. I thought the exercises in ego dissolution and accumulation more interesting, perhaps that's some soul searching for me to do. I am vaguely aware this book is part of a literary universe that I'd like to and have yet to engage with, so I can't speak on the relationship or if what I take issue with is reconciled. I will return to the text. I recommend this book but am not sure it is appropriate for a friend imprisoned.
August 13, 2015
Volodine's project and style is utterly thrilling. I'm glad I started with Minor Angels, though, strangely, this might be a good place to start. It seems to play a similar role in Volodine's literature as Nazi Literature in the Americas plays for Bolaño's. It's certainly not as easy to engage as that work, though, just as Volodine's project as a whole seems more dense and (perhaps at the surface) unapproachable. But there's a wicked sense of humor here, and for those of us that feel, at times, the sheer weight of Capital and the seeming impossibility of imagining an art or literature or way of connection that might somehow break free and help us imagine a better world, Volodine's work is a revelation. The Post-Exoticists (we learn) worked their art in this (imagined) time after capitalism fell, but also during the time when it rose again and imprisoned and crushed the radical egalitarians that had once stood against it. This book is a strange overview of their efforts, with interwoven examples and interviews with various key figures.
Though it remains unspoilable, still I feel I should not say more. Immerse yourself, let it teach you how to read it. In the meantime, I wait anxiously for Elliott Bay Book Co to deliver me more works by Volodine/Post-Exoticists. Up next, In the Time of the Blue Ball and Naming the Jungle: A Novel.
Though it remains unspoilable, still I feel I should not say more. Immerse yourself, let it teach you how to read it. In the meantime, I wait anxiously for Elliott Bay Book Co to deliver me more works by Volodine/Post-Exoticists. Up next, In the Time of the Blue Ball and Naming the Jungle: A Novel.
June 22, 2015
So what is post-exoticism?
Maybe I could attempt to explain it like this. Literature is art, right? Painting is art, right? I own a very large painting (84 cm x 170 cm) by Tjariya (Nungalka) Stanley from Ernabella (pictured). If I was to describe to you what it represents, without you seeing it, I’d have a minimal chance of explaining beyond, colours, dots, size, and materials. If I was to explain that it was the story of “the older sister going a long way to get her younger sister and bring her back” as the artist has explained, you’d still have no idea. If I spoke of Wingellina and Docker River and inma, I’d confuse you even more. But it is still art right? It still evokes emotions, takes you on a journey when being viewed, even if you do not understand the detailed imagery or even the representation of the shapes. Does the fact that Tjariya (Nungalka) Stanley was originally taught batik by Daisy Baker following her visit to Indonesia in the 1970’s add more depth to your understanding of the painting? All relevant or irrelevant?
That’s how I explain post-exoticism as a literary art form, I don’t.
For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/20...
Maybe I could attempt to explain it like this. Literature is art, right? Painting is art, right? I own a very large painting (84 cm x 170 cm) by Tjariya (Nungalka) Stanley from Ernabella (pictured). If I was to describe to you what it represents, without you seeing it, I’d have a minimal chance of explaining beyond, colours, dots, size, and materials. If I was to explain that it was the story of “the older sister going a long way to get her younger sister and bring her back” as the artist has explained, you’d still have no idea. If I spoke of Wingellina and Docker River and inma, I’d confuse you even more. But it is still art right? It still evokes emotions, takes you on a journey when being viewed, even if you do not understand the detailed imagery or even the representation of the shapes. Does the fact that Tjariya (Nungalka) Stanley was originally taught batik by Daisy Baker following her visit to Indonesia in the 1970’s add more depth to your understanding of the painting? All relevant or irrelevant?
That’s how I explain post-exoticism as a literary art form, I don’t.
For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/20...
August 31, 2015
"Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven" feels like an introduction to a huge maze of ideas. In the beginning, it is the end, a final croak in a thought on a literary movement where all of the authors are imprisoned, are dying in various ways (the lush black mold not helping anyone), and Lutz Bassmann is the last of the authors still alive. The twist of all of this is that Antoine Volodine is not just writing a fake testament to a dying breed, but he is giving an overview of his own work. He is also Lutz Bassmann. He is also Manuela Draeger. He is Post-Exoticism. Volodine has made the ambitious leap into creating his own world where literature is important, and he is not trying to create a few books in this new genre that he has made up, but he is trying to create the entire library. "Post-exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven," is not for the casual reader that is looking for a thrill. The novel is actually kind of boring because it feels less like a continuation of the ideas Volodine has been working on, but it is an introduction to his huge work. I am impressed by the scope of detail that his art contains, and for that, I'm interesting in delving more into his work.
July 1, 2024
(7 Novembre, 2021)
Mon premier Volodine, peut-être aussi mon dernier. Une histoire sans histoire avec une logique illogique, qui a suscité peu d'intérêt en moi. Volodine, ou ses nombreux hétéronymes, nous offre une explication de son mouvement 'post-exotique' que je n'ai pas vraiment compris, ni suis-je incliné à le faire.
Dans une prison quelconque, un sans-dessein, ou le narrateur (ce n'est pas clair... et je m'en fou!), a un entretien avec deux journalistes. Le but est de comprendre le système littéraire des radicaux emprissonnés. Malheureusement pour eux et pour l'état, Bassmann (Volodine), le dernier de ces révolutionnaires (qui sont tous Volodine), ne coopère pas. Il décrit un monde soliptique et irréel qui me fait un peu penser à The Autumn of the Patriarch de Márquez pour quelque raison.
J'avoue que mes goûts de livres sont éclectiques mais ceci est trop différent pour que je l'apprécie, possiblement, à sa juste valeur...
Mon premier Volodine, peut-être aussi mon dernier. Une histoire sans histoire avec une logique illogique, qui a suscité peu d'intérêt en moi. Volodine, ou ses nombreux hétéronymes, nous offre une explication de son mouvement 'post-exotique' que je n'ai pas vraiment compris, ni suis-je incliné à le faire.
Dans une prison quelconque, un sans-dessein, ou le narrateur (ce n'est pas clair... et je m'en fou!), a un entretien avec deux journalistes. Le but est de comprendre le système littéraire des radicaux emprissonnés. Malheureusement pour eux et pour l'état, Bassmann (Volodine), le dernier de ces révolutionnaires (qui sont tous Volodine), ne coopère pas. Il décrit un monde soliptique et irréel qui me fait un peu penser à The Autumn of the Patriarch de Márquez pour quelque raison.
J'avoue que mes goûts de livres sont éclectiques mais ceci est trop différent pour que je l'apprécie, possiblement, à sa juste valeur...
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January 17, 2016I don't want to leave any stars because I'm not sure what to make of this. There are some interesting ideas about literature and literary movements in general here, but I learned more about the setting and context of the piece by reading the jacket copy. I feel like I need to read some other Volodine work, some other post-exotic novel, to make sense of what I just read, or why it needed to be written THIS way, as opposed to some formal treatise on the power of the written word and how literature, to the uninitiated, is essentially a walled off kingdom (and to those on the inside, a prison). But by itself, it seems like the key to something but I don't know where the lock is or why I need to open it. It's like someone trying to explain a show like Lost without bothering to explain the plot or characters. You sort of get it in the abstract, but it's hard to get invested in the conversation.
September 19, 2016
This book was mind blowingly good, I have been in a reading rut for a while and this snapped me out of it. As the title suggests, The book is about the literary movement post exoticism, but the book itself serves as an example of this post exoticism--a movement in which the writers write from cells In a prison and the outside world is rarely addressed. The movement serves as a fitting metaphor for the hyperawareness and insularity post modern literature, but instead of doing away with the outside world or world outside the text, the author treats the head space that the text creates as a sort of shamanistic mystical realm where he and the reader can exist together in a way that transcends death, our bodies, and status as humans. It seems cerebral at first but there is a ton of heart in this book.
July 28, 2016
What's not to like about an alternate history novella featuring an ersatz OULIPO as a kind of shamanistic Red Army Faction? The tone, for one: Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven hits the same semi-mystic, hall of mirrors irony that makes French post-structuralism so insufferable. I have my suspicions that Volodine is clowning around with his refusal grant stable characters and narration, but since he never breaks the poker-face it's hard to tell if he's joking or serious about being the second coming of Derrida.
Still, this little fiction has a density of ideas per page to rival Borges, and for that alone it's a decent way to spend an afternoon. I just wish Volodine had picked up on Borges' clarity, too.
Still, this little fiction has a density of ideas per page to rival Borges, and for that alone it's a decent way to spend an afternoon. I just wish Volodine had picked up on Borges' clarity, too.
July 29, 2015
I might have read this wrong (I paused for each of the 10 lessons, but I found myself more drawn in when I kept reading and came back to the inserts). That detracted a little bit from the book, I think.
Even so, this book is set up with some really grand-scale ideas, but I didn't feel like it paid them off quite enough.
My first Volodine, and supposedly this is connected to everything else of his, so there's a big picture consideration as well.
So maybe if I had read other Volodine, and was more familiar with the ideas he presents here, and read this in a slightly different manner I might have gotten more out of it. As it was, this was just OK.
Even so, this book is set up with some really grand-scale ideas, but I didn't feel like it paid them off quite enough.
My first Volodine, and supposedly this is connected to everything else of his, so there's a big picture consideration as well.
So maybe if I had read other Volodine, and was more familiar with the ideas he presents here, and read this in a slightly different manner I might have gotten more out of it. As it was, this was just OK.
February 12, 2017
Todos deberíamos de ser post-exóticos.
June 8, 2015
Um... ? This book is clearly meant to be read more than once. I am piqued about Antoine Volodine's oeurve. I like how it ends -some (many?) people will find it infuriating. Is it really clever? or a little too clever?
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